


Sundial

by secretsoup



Category: DuckTales (Cartoon 2017)
Genre: F/F, Mourning, Second Person Perspective, cleaning as coping mechanism, post-season 1 finale, shippy or not dealer's choice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2018-08-18
Packaged: 2019-06-29 07:51:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15725133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/secretsoup/pseuds/secretsoup
Summary: You’re at Lena’s amphitheater. This wasn't intentional, and it hurts to look at, to be here, knowing what you know about her now, but this is the single most Lena place there is in all of Duckburg, maybe the whole world, and if you want to keep her in your story, even a little, maybe this is a good place to start.





	Sundial

**Author's Note:**

> Post Season 1 finale. This was MY coping mechanism.

It's been two days since…..since.

There's so much to do, the bin is crumbling down the hill, the mansion is a disaster, the city is in shock. It's all hands on deck!! Which is good because it's good to keep busy, to keep your hands occupied, to be distracted with the rushing and yelling and laughter of your family (!!) when otherwise you think you would probably just sit down on the ground and cry. But there's no time for that, there's work to be done. Work, work, work!! Work is good. It's good to be working. Uncle Scrooge would be proud.

But Granny notices you trying too hard, moving to fast, maybe a _little_ manic, struggling with trying to haul bin-wreckage so large even you can't lift it without seriously hurting yourself, and makes you go take a break. You try to argue, but she's Granny, and only a few people can argue with Granny, like Uncle Scrooge, or-

Her.

There’s a Lena-sized hole in your heart. If anyone heard you say that, they'd probably try to correct you, and say it was a Lena- _shaped_ hole, that's how the saying goes. But you'd both be right, because it's Lena-shaped AND Lena-sized, it's bigger than you, a Lena-esque black hole that threatens to engulf you if you think about it for more than a 15 seconds which was fine when they let you help work until you passed out on the ground from exhaustion and Granny had to carry you to bed but now you have to take a BREAK and now you have to think about how your best friend is gone and how she's gone because when it came down to you or her she wanted you to still be here even if it meant she wasn't and thats like something noble and heroic and tragic out of a book but the thing about books is that you close them when the story’s over and move on and Lena’s story is over but yours just keeps going and going and going and it's not fair that your story should keep going without her in it anymore.

(This is why you didn't want to take a break.)

You’re at Lena’s amphitheater. This wasn't intentional, and it hurts to look at, to be here, knowing what you know about her now, but this is the single most Lena place there is in all of Duckburg, maybe the whole world, and if you want to keep her in your story, even a little, maybe this is a good place to start.

You think about the little room under the stage and you feel sick. But everything that's left of her is down there too, so. Maybe.

You trigger the trap door and descend the stairs to Lena’s home-apartment-room-cave. _No wonder she always wanted to sleep at our place,_ Louie had said. No wonder. If you'd known, you never would have let her leave. If you’d known she was living on cereal and -- you check the mini fridge, and, ugh, gross, of course the milk is spoiled -- energy drinks you’d have made sure she got better food more often. If you’d known, if you'd _asked_ , maybe this could have all been prevented. Maybe if you’d insisted on getting to know her a little better instead of trying so hard to get her to like you and fawning over her like a love-sick puppy, she would still be here, maybe Uncle Scrooge could have kept her safe and stopped all of this before it started--

But maybe not. Maybe Magica was just stronger than anything you could have done, even if you'd known how to help.

Magica said Lena was never real, but you know that's not true, because you held her hand and hugged her, so you know she was _solid_ . And Lena decorated this room with teenager stuff, posters and pictures, she tried to grow plants down here even if there wasn't any sun, so you know she had a _personality_ . And she ate food like she needed it, not just because she could, and there’s a small stash of toilet paper in the corner and that's, oh god, that's so awful, that's so _bad_ , _no one deserves to live like this, no one, not ever, oh,_ **_Lena_ ** _,_ so you know she was _alive._

She stood up for you, defended you, sacrificed herself for you, so you know she _loved_.

Lena was real. She was real and she lived here.

Past tense.

Lena is gone.

You sit on the edge of her bed. She slept here. The mattress is disgusting, musty, lumpy, but she needed sleep, because she was real, and this is where that happened. All the nights she wasn't with you she was here, and you wish she'd spent every night with you instead, because this is terrible. You lie down and sink into a Lena-shaped indentation in the mattress.

Under a certain amount of dampness and mustiness and stale cereal, you can smell her. There’s an oversized hoodie on the bed, and without even really thinking about it you sit up and pull it on. It smells like her too. You pull the hood down low and tuck your knees up into the waistband, and try, really, really, really hard not to cry.

It doesn't work.

You hug her pillow like it's the only thing between you and drowning in your sorrow, like it's _her_ , and you cry until you fall asleep in her bed.

 

  
  
She’s there in your dream. Kind of. She’s misty, translucent, and keeps evading your eye when you try to look at her, she moves around you in circles with the smooth mechanical regularity of a second hand sweeping around a clock face and you're the hour hand, too slow to keep up with her.

“You're safe,” she says. Her voice is threadbare, weak, and a galaxy away.

“Thanks to you,” you say, sad and happy at once. “Why’d you save me? Magica said-”

“You’re my friend,” she whispers as she passes, and you can see her face, sort of, and her lazy smart-ass smile and dreamy eyes punts your heart right up into your throat. “You beautiful idiot.”

You’d kiss her, probably, if you could only reach her.

“I didn't know,” you say, about….everything. About Magica, about her, about the spoiled milk and the stash of toilet paper.  

“That was the point, dummy.”

It's killing you that you can't turn your head to look at her.

“I'm dreaming,” you tell her and regret it instantly because now you'll lose the dream!! If you go lucid you’ll wake up and maybe never see her again. “Lena I’m in your room at the beach, it’s bad, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry I didn't try harder, that I didn't make you eat more pancakes or offer to do your laundry, or that I ever _ever_ let you leave, that I didn't ask about you more--”

Lena makes a sound like an audible wince. “Oooo, you saw that, huh? Sorry.”

“ _I’m_ sorry! Lena, I'm _so sorry_ , I know if I’d asked you wouldn't have told me anyway because you had to lie about everything but I don't blame you for that because I know it wasn't your fault but I like you so much and I know that seems shallow because I realize I know so little about you-” boy it's a good thing you don't have to breathe in dreams “-but you’re my _best friend_ and I miss you so much, Lena, it's only been two days! It’s been two days and it hurts so bad.”

You’re crying now, hard, and the dream is losing shape. The ghost-Lena stops her orbit directly behind you as the dream melts into bright white, a roaring, blazing sun, cresting the horizon five feet in front of you.

From behind your head, but in barely more than a breath, she says, “We have time. I got your back, Webby.”

And she's gone.

  


When you wake up the first thing you do is empty her fridge. The energy drinks can stay, but the milk and the stale cereal have to go. You throw out the dead plants, the crusty dishes, the slightly damp toilet paper, burnt down candle nubs, and anything else that doesn't seem personal, important or irreplaceable. Some of her posters are just destroyed with moisture and mildew. You’ll replace them another day with something else. You gather up all her clothes and bedding and take them to a laundromat -- you’re not sure you could explain it to Granny, though you think she'd understand and help you with it if you did, you're just not ready to talk about any of this yet. You launder everything, even the hoodie. You wish you didn't have to, that you could keep some element of her on them, but they're dirty and they stink and just knowing they were hers is enough, and if she were here you think she’d be grateful to have fresh, soft clean clothes and sheets.

You try and clean her room, but there's only so much you can do when the paint is chipping and the walls are crumbling. Maybe it’ll be an ongoing project. Maybe you’ll sneak down here and see what you can do with some whitewash? Maybe you’ll ask the boys for help, that could be fun! In the meantime you wipe down what you can, you polish her mirror and dust her creepy bric a brac and chase spiders out of corners. She has a lot of bones in here, like you needed a reason to miss her even more, you didn't know she collected bones, you could have been comparing bone collections this _whole time_?? The greatest tragedy of your young life.

You drag her mattress out up onto the stage into the sun to air out.

You don't know why you're doing this. She's gone, and even if she wasn't, you wouldn't let her come back here ever again. It wouldn't need to be clean, because she wouldn't need to live here anymore.

But, just the same. It helps you, right now, in this moment.

You shuffle off along the beach while the mattress airs to pick some flowers and toe the shore for sea glass or shells or, just. Anything nice to brighten the place up. Maybe that's not Lena’s aesthetic, but it's yours, and Lena liked you well enough, so you think she would have appreciated it. You’re working your way back to the amphitheater with an armful of Queen Anne’s lace and mountain lilac and a pocket full of worn smooth beach glass in blue and green when something catches your eye, a shadow-

You drop your flowers and assume the position, instinctually ready to knock someone's block off. But it's just a large black bird, a crow, pecking at something shining in the rocks by the water. When you get closer you can see it's a gold coin, undoubtedly Uncle Scrooge’s, and you smile thinking how happy he’ll be to have it back, just one lousy coin out of billions. You stoop to pick up the coin and with it comes a tangled string of sea grass and with the sea grass comes-

Oh.

It’s Lena’s friendship bracelet.

You rinse it off in the water and tie it around your wrist, next to yours. They look like they were made to be worn together, which is a silly thing to think because you made them, after all. Of course they match.

Of course they belong together.

You pocket the coin, gather up your flowers and head back to the room under the amphitheater. After dragging the mattress back downstairs, you make her bed with the fresh sheets, and arrange the flowers and the little bits of glass around the room so that it _almost_ looks like a place you could spend some time in, the two of you. Maybe not to _live_ in, but a secret club house of sorts. Somewhere to run away to for the day, or camp out in for just one night so you could sneak up to the beach in the dead of night and wade knee deep into the ocean and curse at the tide or some other silly girlish fantasy.

Or maybe it's just a slightly less depressing tomb. Because Lena is gone and will do none of those things with you now.

The only other thing you want to do right now, that absolutely can't wait, is change the light bulbs. The black light is creepy, but you think you know why she had it. For now it's just a new  light bulb, but when you come back another time with more flowers and some other nice things maybe you’ll bring a new lamp altogether.

When you replace the lightbulb and the room fills with something far closer to daylight, you see the space is going to take a lot more work that you expected. It’ll definitely need that white wash, and a more thorough cleaning, but that’s okay! You like a project.

Also, it casts a much more vivid shadow than the black light did. It surprises you for a moment, and there's another moment where you have to blink your eyes against the change in light and you _swear_ , it seemed like….but no. That's silly, right? You thought you saw your shadow ripple, like splash rings in a pond.

You swear you saw it move.

You are thinking _maybe there's a gas leak down here or something_ when your shadow opens its eyes.

You are about to yell, or start swinging, when the eyes are gone and it's a regular shadow again. You wait, patiently, holding your breath, for the shadow to make another move, but it doesn’t. Nothing else happens.

You don't know how to feel about that.

You raise your arm, the one with the friendship bracelets, above your head, and your shadow does the same, but when you lower it,

your shadow arm hesitates.

Only by a second. It's like a lag. Not even like it's trying to keep up a facade of being your shadow, but like it's trying to NOT be your shadow. Like whatever's in it is weak and struggling to gain autonomy.

_I got your back_.

“Lena?”

It’s presumptuous of you, it COULD be a trick, it could be Magica, but you know what Lena is and you saw her protect you at the bin, and she came from _you_ , from the magic you made with her that one time-

The shadow ripples again.

“LENA!”

You do what you would be doing if she were here in the flesh, you throw your arms around her and give her a BIG KISS, which, in this situation, amounts to body checking the grimy wall so hard you bounce off it and land on your butt. The shadow’s edges wobble in what might be concern or laughter, you don't know, but you love it and you love her and you’re definitely going to cry again.

“Lena what can I do?? How can I help? Can we get you out?”

The shadow doesn't respond for a long time, either because she doesn't know or she can't. Then, finally, slowly, she raises one arm and points. You try and track the two dimensional gesture in three dimensional space and land on a spooky looking chest on the far side of the room. Inside are half a dozen well worn if not literally ancient texts in just as many languages. Magica’s stuff, probably, and if you leave them here she’ll almost certainly come back for them. They’re safer with you then they are here, and if they can help you get Lena back, then there’s not a single question about it. You wrap them all up in Lena’s newly clean hoodie, which you were absolutely planning to steal anyway.

“I’m going to save you,” you tell her, reinvigorated, full to bursting with something bright and golden. “And you’re going to live with us and we’ll take care of you and we’re going eat chocolate chip pancakes for dinner every night for _a week_. For the rest of your life, if you want!” You lean against the wall, right into her. “I mean it, Lena. I’m not giving up, no matter what.”

And you kiss her, sort of, or the closest you can manage in this weird, wild situation. You clutch your bundle tight to your chest and scurry off, mildly embarrassed but mostly giddy and triumphant. She’s with you, of course, everywhere you go now. She’s got your back.

You have a lot of work to do, but that’s okay.

You like a project.


End file.
